Going Inkless

Cielle is not the name my mother gave me, at least not directly.  What's more, nobody calls me by that name when speaking to me, and it's not even my outgrown childhood nickname.  It does link back to those times, however.  My sisters and I were all given names that start with "C", and since our last names were all the same, the only difference in our initials came with the middle names.  When we needed them for property marking or to distinguish our scores for a game, we were always C.A, C.L, C.B, C.F, and C.M.  Mine was just the only combination that sounded like a name of it's own, a sort of feminized version of the French word for heavens, le ciel .  Ever since that time, it has been my all-purpose nom-de-plume and secret identity; so, when I had to establish a user name for this blog years ago, it seemed a natural choice.  This was to be a collection of personal meditations and a way to reach out beyond street-level interactions.  It wasn't a...

     It's approaching a month since I last posted on this blog.  There are reasons.  As I've mentioned before, where there is silence, there is still activity you're not seeing...yet.      Among all of the usual summer things to do, I've been working at building the website that will display some of the short stories we (my husband and I) have been writing.  It's slow going, and every little piece is a puzzle I have to solve.  There has been frustration and discovery, and enormous satisfaction in the simplest accomplishments like getting the title to show up or getting a menu to work right.  I still feel a little like a fraud, not really knowing what I'm doing, but jumping in and making it work anyway.  The good news is that it shouldn't be much longer before I have the framework ready and can start managing the site instead of just building it.  So, please be patient while my attention is elsewhere.  I'm hoping it ...

a short trip...      In the course of planning and designing a website, I've started to wonder how the internet became a place.  It's a fairly new concept as a whole, and somewhere along the way as it has grown, we gradually decided to think of it as a place.  We chose terminology appropriate to that idea.  There are sites you find at an address.  You can go into a chat room or go to a page.  You can view a gallery or library.  You start out  and return to a home.  Every mailbox has a place it's @.  Yet all this real estate is in your head.  It's imaginary.  Of course, the information that makes up this imaginary landscape is kept somewhere.  Even the airy "cloud" you picture is a heavy, earthbound mass of silicon and wiring somewhere in the physical world, or rather several masses.  But that information is what constitutes the internet, not the machines it's stored on.  The internet is really an id...